Silicon Valley’s ‘tech bros’ egos and excesses run amok. Can they just move to Texas? | Opinion

California has its share of detractors, but not me. Though not a native, I have lived here most of my life, and am proud of the state’s natural wonders, amazing ethnic diversity and world-class big cities.

Silicon Valley, the high-tech neighborhood, makes my home-state pride list as well. Who wouldn’t take satisfaction coming from where the iPhone was invented?

But it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to feel positive about some of tech’s leaders, whose excesses and excuses in the name of profit and ego run amok.

Anyone with common sense knows that Google operates a monopoly when it comes to internet searches. The federal government thinks so and has sued Google. The case is making its way through court, and Google, headquartered in Mountain View, has argued that there is actually competition in the search arena. Yeah, right. How often does one hear, “Just Bing it” when needing an answer?

Then there is Elon Musk and his ownership of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and headquartered in San Francisco. One of the world’s richest men, Musk in November publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among white supremacists: that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.”

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied on X to his 160 million followers.

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Musk also owns Tesla, the electric vehicle maker with the factory in Fremont. Tesla is one of the world’s top 10 companies, valued at nearly $700 billion. Musk runs SpaceX, the rocket manufacturer; Starlink, the low-Earth satellite company; and other firms.

Then there is Meta, formerly Facebook, the invention of Mark Zuckerberg.

Once beloved as an online community where friends could keep abreast of each other’s lives, Facebook-now-Meta has faced accusations of allowing extremist views to dominate and weaken America’s political discourse. Meta’s Instagram platform is the target of the attorneys general from 33 states who contend its algorithms addict children but cause them mental illness.

As reported by Reuters, “the attorneys general of 33 states including California and New York said Meta, which also operates Facebook, repeatedly misled the public about the dangers of its platforms and knowingly induced young children and teenagers into addictive and compulsive social media use.”

And there are even more sinister problems at Meta, as a recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal has shown.

Profiting off kids

To compete with the highly popular video streaming service TikTok, Meta created Reels. It shows short videos on topics the system determines the viewer will find interesting.

The Journal wanted to see what videos Reels would provide a viewer with a prurient interest in children, so reporters set up test accounts to follow only young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other young social-media influencers active on the platform.

The result? Reels provided risque videos of children and overtly sexual adult videos, the Journal reported. More shocking was how the videos were interspersed with ads from mainline American businesses like Walmart and Disney.

The newspaper had previously reported how Meta’s algorithms connect communities of users interested in pedophilic content. In response to that story, Meta created a task force and expanded automated systems to detect suspicious users. Meta says it now takes down tens of thousands of such accounts each month.

But before Reels was launched, the Journal said that Meta’s safety staff raised the alarm that videos of children would be put together with inappropriate content. Safety officers wanted the company to avoid videos of children. Meta’s leaders did not follow the recommendation.

In its latest defense, Meta says the Journal’s test-accounts methodology created manufactured results. However, the Canadian Centre of Child Protection found Instagram routinely featured videos of children who also are on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s digital database.

Colossal egos

In a recent article for The Guardian, Douglass Rushkoff describes Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires as believing they are beyond the common man, and indeed, Earth itself.

“Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon, underground lair in New Zealand, or virtual reality server in the cloud,” Rushkoff said.

Peter Thiel, one of the originators of PayPal with Musk, plans to create a community of “seasteaders” that will float on the ocean. Musk wants to create a city of 1 million people on Mars. Sam Altman, the artificial intelligence evangelist behind ChatGPT, hopes to upload his consciousness to the online cloud.

Average people, the consumers of the tech products created by these billionaires, are seen by the “tech bros” as “necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension,” writes Rushkoff with the British form of English.

Maybe I am naive, but instead of dreaming of colonizing space or sea, how about helping improve life here in California? The San Joaquin Valley is one of the poorest regions in the nation; there are countless ways these uber-rich men could make a real difference.

But putting people on Mars is so much more exciting. And if some kids are seen by pedophiles in videos? Well, that’s just business.

I love boasting about the Golden State when relatives come to visit. But certain tech bros of Silicon Valley? I really wish they join Musk and move to Texas.